The nation’s three consumer credit-reporting companies — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — today jointly announced the introduction of a new credit score that aims to simplify and enhance the credit process for consumers and credit grantors.
The new VantageScore leverages shared data from all three companies and analyzes it to arrive at a score. Under the new scoring system, credit score variance between credit-reporting companies will be attributed to data differences within each of the three consumer credit files and not to the structure of the scoring model or data interpretation.
“As markets have matured, so have customers’ needs,” said TransUnion’s Chet Wiermanski, one of the creators of VantageScore and vice president of analytics for the company.
The score analyzes data at the same point in time on the same consumer records from all three national credit-reporting companies. VantageScore was developed using a national sample of anonymous credit information of approximately 15 million consumers and uses a score range of 990-501.
“By developing a patent-pending approach to consistently interpret the credit information stored within each credit repository, also referred to as characteristic leveling, any credit scoring differences between the credit-reporting companies can be attributed to data differences in a consumer’s credit file rather than data interpretation — as is the case in most scoring models today,” said Wiermanski.
Wiermanski was responsible for implementing TransUnion’s first scoring systems for a variety of industries. He has done extensive work in the areas of predictive modeling and the use of event-based triggers and is the author of numerous white papers and studies on the subject. He also is an active member of Georgetown University’s Credit Research Center.
VantageScore is being independently marketed and sold separately through each of the three national credit-reporting companies via licensing agreements with VantageScore Solutions LLC.
***
Send tips or a Letter to the Editor to jessica@inman.com or call (510) 658-9252, ext. 133.
